Many are working for peace in the ongoing conflicts, and feasible compromises should be achievable, because everybody is tired of war. But will any ceasefires last?
“The lovers’ faith is like the Arabian phoenix — everyone says it exists, no one knows where,” the Italian poet Metastasio sang, in verses that come back to mind whenever one thinks of peace. Or rather, we should talk of “peaces,” needed to end the senseless “Third World War in pieces,” as Pope Francis called it, which is bleeding a good part of the world.
For us Italians, the restoration of a state of peace — or at least of a truce that, even without the name of peace, would in fact produce all its effects — carries perhaps greater importance than it does in other European countries.
This is so because our political commitments and our country’s geography force us to feel engaged on two fronts at once: to the northeast of the continent, because of our NATO commitments, and to the southeast, because a strongly Mediterranean nation cannot disregard what has been happening in the Middle East.
Moreover, for a combination of many reasons, Italians are, as all the polls show, the European people most reluctant to accept as inevitable a condition of semi-permanent semi-war such as the one we are living in now.
Most Italians want peace, and they want it immediately, both on the border between Russia and Ukraine and in that torn Middle East.
Italians want it so badly that they keep trying to attribute the war to the madness of individual men or ruling classes. Depending on one’s convictions and sympathies, many are blamed: US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on one side; first the ayatollahs and then the Revolutionary Guards on the other; and in the northeast, the “Tsar” Vladimir Putin, pitted against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, always seen in military garb.
The hope — never openly admitted but nonetheless present — remains that what is happening depends essentially on the perverse will of a few individuals, and that their removal from the political scene could considerably ease the path toward a general peace settlement.
This is undoubtedly true, but only in part. In any case, none of the main players can, at this point, take even a single step back without an adequate excuse allowing him, if not to save the outcome, then at least to save face.
This holds true even for those most deeply implicated in the current situation: Putin, who has bestowed on Mother Russia a war even longer than the “Great Patriotic War”; Trump, who was elected promising peace and instead brought the US nothing but military commitments and economic restrictions; and Netanyahu, who after the imminent upcoming elections may finally have to face justice in his own country.
It is, in a sense, the same problem faced by Zelensky. He is caught in the pincers of an internal opposition growing ever stronger and more aggressive — forcing him into continual dismissals of the best men in his government and armed forces — and of the diffidence of major countries, with Poland and Germany in the front line, who regard Ukraine as a costly, dangerous, and inconvenient friend.
It would be necessary to seek one, or several, compromise solutions, given how sharply the various theaters of operation differ from one another. Those compromises should be acceptable to all parties.
Impossible? In a sense, nothing is impossible under the sun — especially if the various processes are managed by people belonging to that category described as “men of good will.”
Besides, there is presently a veritable army of aspiring mediators lined up. Some have met with apparently greater success, such as Pakistan, Turkey, and Oman, as well as, occasionally, a sprinkling of Gulf emirates. Others prefer to work in silence, as the Arab League and Egypt are probably doing. And then there is Trump, loudly claiming to be simultaneously a party to the dispute and its mediator.
Will some conclusion be reached? Probably yes, if only because this piecemeal world war has already lasted too long for the economies and the psychological endurance of parts of the world no longer accustomed to real war.
Will a “just” peace be reached? Certainly not — truly just peaces have, in fact, never existed, with all due respect to Thomist-Augustinian doctrine on the matter.
What matters, in any case, is that the compromises reached prove solid and capable of lasting without producing excessive drawbacks.
Over time, moreover, they could be considerably reinforced by the eventual official entry into the field of a China that, up to now, has operated only with great discretion, behind the scenes, and of other middle powers that have so far maintained, at best, ambiguous attitudes.
Can we hope that the European Union, too, will realize the degree to which it is already involved, both in the northeast and in the south, and will react accordingly? Perhaps — but given how things have gone so far, that is decidedly hoping for too much!
